The Google AdWords Conundrum

The expiration date for my $100 -- now $75 since March 11 -- Google AdWords gift card is looming and I'm not sure what to do. I feel silly for passing up an opportunity to advertise my blog for free and potentially increase hits to it, but I just don't like the idea of putting my blog in Google advertising. Why? I hate most Google ads that I see. They're hardly ever relevant to what I'm searching for or what I'm looking at.

I remember when I used to have Google Ads on my blog. This was back when I wrote mostly about my ongoing health issues, so I kept getting ads about MRI centres and remedies -- that kind of thing. I wasn't even complaining about MRI wait times or anything, but because my words and phrases matched the tags chosen by certain advertisers, those MRI ads came to me. I wasn't about to promote MRI centres. That's not what this blog is about. And how can I support an MRI centre I haven't even used before?

Also, Blogger doesn't seem to have any meta tag formatting for pages. A meta description is the summary of a website you see when you look at in a search page. It's under the title of the page. So I can't have proper meta descriptions without doing some hardcore html work on my blog's template. It's complicated and I don't really understand how it works. Instead, if you Google my blog title Beyond Passing Time, under each entry title, you'll see meta descriptions that just have lumps of text from that post, or even lumps of texts from comments. I'm not about to post that in Google ads because they wouldn't really make sense to people. Who would click on them?

My blog hasn't suffered from my lack of proper meta descriptions, though. By analyzing my blog statistics, I regularly see that people click on my blog after finding it on Google through searches. My discussion about the film Black Swan still gets traffic this way. I'm happy that Google ranks my posts high in certain searches. I'm confident that continuing to write about what people want to read will bring more traffic to this blog than Google Ads ever will.

Maybe I'd get even more traffic with better meta tags, as having popular and relevant words and phrases in your meta descriptions is important for search engine optimization of your site.

And maybe advertising my blog on Google would draw great traffic to it if I had good meta tags. Or who knows, maybe I'd get better traffic through Google advertising even with my bad meta descriptions. I don't know. I might take advantage of the $75 remainder of my Google AdWords gift card... Just to see what happens. I think advertising my poor meta tags would make me look like an unprofessional writer/amateur webmaster. Plus, I don't click on Google Ads. I don't even read the whole ad if the meta description is not a summary of the page. I don't expect people to do or hope that they will do what I wouldn't do myself.

Plus, I think the hippie in me is afraid of selling out. That's also partly why I very seldom post Amazon ads on here. I don't expect that if I put Google and Amazon ads on my site again, that I'd get enough clicks on the ads to get a significant profit. That's where the profit comes from. You don't get money from people seeing the ad on your site. Only if they click on it. And the amount of money depends on how much the site proprietor pays per click. It's not worth putting ads up just to make pennies a month.

Also, I just don't like the appearance of Google Ads. The design makes the ads looks so spammy and unreputable.

I think offering me free advertising and thanking me for using their services was a good online pr move on Google's part. It shows that the company is grateful for my help and wants my site to succeed, but also, like any freebie promotion, it can hook people in, so they'll want to continue using the service after they've used up the free part.

Do you ever click on Google Ads? Would create a Google Ad for your own blog? If you do advertise using Google Ads, does it generate significant traffic to your blog?

Has Black Swan Influenced Perceptions of Ballet?

In Black Swan, dancer Nina Sayers loses her mind as she prepares for both the movie's title role and the role of the white swan in a production of Swan Lake. The Black Swan character is evil and sensual, characteristics that Nina must find within herself to play the Black Swan well. Early on in the film it becomes clear that she has a history of mental health issues. She becomes increasingly paranoid as her preparation for the role consumes her, but it's always unclear what is really happening: is the blood real? The feathers? To Nina, they are real and so they are real to us.

But what consequences may such a dark film have on perceptions of ballet dancers? Several dancers have come out in an obvious PR move to try to dispel stereotypes of ballet dancers as being cold, masochistic, tightly wound and super competitive. In a December Los Angeles Times interview, two principal dancers in the New York's American Ballet Theatre answer questions about similarities between Nina's experiences in Black Swan and their own experiences preparing for and performing in shows.

While they explain that some aspects of the film are realistic, at points it is clear that Murphy and Hallberg, particularly Murphy, are trying to debunk notions of ballet that Black Swan has perpetuated:

GM: "Most of my colleagues have a great sense of humor... you have to embrace the role onstage and experience what that character is about — very repressed and angry. But does that mean I was a nightmare to live with? Absolutely not ... The mean-spiritedness portrayed in the movie was disturbing to me ... It (dance film The Red Shoes) asks the question of how can a dancer experience and portray greatness onstage and also have a full personal life — and as a woman, have kids and get married. In this day and age, people do it all the time."

This interview and other articles about the Black Swan film clearly show that some in the ballet world are afraid about the impact the film may have on people's perceptions of their craft. Will Black Swan hurt ballet? Apparently not. Tickets for The New York City Ballet and Russian National Ballet at Valley Performing Arts Center productions of Swan Lake have been selling wildly.





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